The Ping Pong Player and the Professor: An Anthropologist Explores Fatherhood and Meaning in an Extraordinary Sport

By Richard Sosis

Most Americans view ping pong as either a basement recreation or the focus of a fraternity-party drinking game. Yet table tennis is an Olympic sport and one of the most popular athletic activities in the world. The Ping Pong Player and the Professor is a quirky memoir about the adventures of a Jewish anthropologist and his son

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildhouse Publications
• Release date: Nov 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988088660

Richard Sosis

Richard Sosis is the James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He is the coauthor of Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics and Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence, and cofounder and coeditor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior. He lives in Massachusetts, which he is still learning how to spell.

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THE PING PONG PLAYER AND THE PROFESSOR

Richard Sosis

Copyright © 2023 Richard Sosis

Design by Melody Stanford Martin

Published by Wildhouse Publications, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing (wildhousepublishing.com). No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission from the publisher, except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Contact [e-mail].

Printed in the USA

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-7360750-8-1

For my other tzaddikim, who have tolerated, sometimes begrudgingly but more often appreciatively, the amount of time I’ve spent with the youngest in our pack. And for my parents, who showed me how to raise tzaddikim.

It is the people not like us who make us grow.

— Jonathan Sacks

Contents

Preface

Prologue

1. Escape from the Basement

2. To Tennis or Not to Tennis …

3. Almost a Brief History of Whiff-Waff

4. For the Love of the Sport

5. A Guide for the Perplexed: Serves, Sounds, and Status

6. The Letter

7. All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter

8. Where Everybody Knows Your Name

9. The Pilgrimage

10. Identity

11. Ping Pong Popping

12. Invisible Things

13. Growing Pains

14. Olympic Dreams

15. On Timeouts and Empty Nests

Epilogue

Appendix A. What an Anxious Ping Pong Pop Keeps in His Table Tennis Bag

Appendix B. How an Anxious Ping Pong Pop Affixes Table Tennis Rubber

Acknowledgements

Notes


Preface

Could you please not use your hands when taking the green beans? I ask, as calmly and politely as I am able, although my frustration at having to endlessly repeat such requests is surely evident. My children, I fear, hear my request as just another optional appeal. My eldest has told me that I may look scary—bearded and comfortably over six feet tall—but the moment I open my mouth it is obvious that I’m a pushover. Apparently, my voice lacks authority.

Authoritative or not, I can’t leave this breach of dining etiquette alone. I point out that the dish of sautéed green beans, a favorite among our family of vegetarians, has a perfectly functional serving fork that should be used.

Yes, but Eliel was using it, Naftali quickly retorts without looking up.

Have we ever let you starve? I ask rhetorically, or so I assume.

Naftali doesn’t hesitate. Who said anything about starving? I just want my fair share before they all disappear. Half a green bean is sticking out of his grinning mouth. Thank goodness he is so cute.

Should we count the green beans out, I offer, like the way we used to share a pack of M&M’s when you were all little?

Brilliant idea Daddy, Rivka, the one who thinks I’m a pushover, adds in a tone that conveys just the right level of sarcasm to elicit smiles rather than stern stares. But the siblings do indeed begin to count the green beans they’ve consumed, a little too precisely for comfort. I can see we are at risk of heading down the rabbit hole that only parents know how to dig, in spite of ourselves. I often find myself at the bottom of that hole, with my ego scathed and bruised, whereas my four teenagers always seem to know how to climb out unaffected. Attempting to distract them from obsessive counting, and the inevitable conclusion that the green bean distribution was unequal, I tactfully divert the conversation to safer territory.

Eliel, how was school today? Eliel, who is in eighth grade, hasn’t yet been possessed by the snarkiness demon that inevitably invades and transforms angelic children during their teen years. If I wish to avoid digging another hole, I know it is prudent to start this ritualized inquiry about their school day with the youngest in our pack. I speak from experience, possibly too much experience.

There was an argument in Hebrew class today, Eliel offers without the usual coaxing.

A fight? Aviva asks excitedly.

No fight. Just an argument over sports.

Oh no, I interrupt. Not a Yankees-Red Sox argument I hope, knowing that living outside of Boston our family’s sympathies in this rivalry are in the minority.

No. In Hebrew class we are doing a unit on sports and Morah Katzenbaum asked how we would define sports.

Funny she should ask that, I interrupt again. "In my Anthropology of Sport course I ask the same question on the first …"

This time it is my turn to be interrupted. Here we go, Naftali mischievously smiles. Prepare for a Professor Daddy lecture.

Everyone laughs, although mine is a bit forced. Long gone are the days when my kids at least feigned interest in my anthropological wisdom. Parents and professors need thick skins to endure their lives of relentless critique. I could still use a few more layers.

Eliel continues. In class Joshua said that you know something is a sport because you get exercise while doing it. Morah Katzenbaum asked him for examples and Joshua said that soccer and basketball were sports. Ping pong—he didn’t know the Hebrew word for it—was not.

Did you correct Joshua? I ask, knowing that Joshua had hit on a topic closer to home than I had anticipated.

Of course, Eliel replies calmly, although given Eliel’s easygoing and conciliatory nature, it certainly was not obvious to me that he would correct Joshua’s misperception. That’s how the argument began. Joshua insisted that sports require movement and since you don’t have to move to play ping pong, or so he said, it’s not a sport. I told him there was plenty of moving in ping pong and it was definitely a sport. Everyone in class agreed with me.

As the youngest in our family, Eliel doesn’t win too many arguments at home, so I was glad to hear that he got the better of this one. And I was particularly delighted that he stood up for his sport.

Despite Joshua’s ignorance about the physical aspects of playing what he referred to as ping pong, his intuition about how to define sport was not far off from the definition of sport I offer my college students. Sports are organized competitions, although as I’ll discuss later, anthropological investigations into sport show that our understanding of competition as having winners and losers is hardly universal. Sports differ from other types of organized competitions, such as games, because in sports the movements of competitors impact the outcome of the competition. This proviso—the manner and impact of movement—helps distinguish games, such as chess and Go Fish, from sports, such as hockey, gymnastics, and archery. Chess and Go Fish require players to move pieces and cards respectively, but the manner in which these movements are performed does not affect who wins or loses. As I tell my students, if someone else could perform the required movements without impacting the competition, such as moving your rook or queen, you are probably looking at a game rather than a sport. There are of course activities that blur and challenge these borders, ranging from card games like Spit to human warfare. But as I’ll note throughout this book, and as anthropologists have long appreciated, human activities don’t fit neatly into boxes. Life is messy. Wonderfully messy, in my opinion. Yes, I’ve slipped into Professor Daddy lecturing mode, an experience my teenage children were, understandably, trying to avoid. In this book I am both Daddy and Professor, but as I’ll explain shortly, much more the former than the latter.

Double Identities

It would be another year or two before Eliel’s classmates and teachers would become fully acquainted with ping pong the sport, that is, table tennis. But by the time Eliel entered high school, many students, teachers, and even administrators actively followed his exploits in this previously unfamiliar world. When Eliel was away at tournaments, his teachers often permitted his classmates to check the tournament results online during class to see how Eliel was faring. And during important competitions, teachers occasionally canceled class so everyone could watch Eliel compete on the tournament live-feed online.

Table tennis has a double identity. On the one hand, it is an Olympic sport and one of the most popular sports in the world, generally ranking within the top ten on most measures of popularity, and within the top five in number of active players worldwide. Yet, competitive table tennis is virtually unknown in mainstream America and the intense physical demands of the sport are not widely appreciated, as Joshua made all too clear. Indeed, in the United States, table tennis is largely seen as a basement recreation or party game, best enjoyed if accompanied by beer.

Often its double identity is distinguished by using different names to categorize the activity: table tennis for the competitive sport, ping pong for the basement game. While many competitive table tennis players in the US will correct newcomers, This is table tennis, not ping pong, in fact, ping pong is the name of the sport in China, and by all measures the Chinese are the kings and queens of table tennis the sport. But if we accept this distinction, then this book is about table tennis, that is, the sport, not the basement game.

In this book I have a double identity as well. On the one hand, I am an anthropologist, and part of what I do in this book is look at table tennis through an anthropological lens. On the other hand, I am a participant in the world of table tennis. Not only am I a former competitive player during my teen years, but I am the equivalent of a soccer mom, or what you might call a ping pong pop. That is, one of my children, Eliel, is a competitive player and I spend too many of my waking hours coordinating his table tennis activities.

Indeed, my double identity has delayed this book for years. As an academic I often juggle multiple projects simultaneously, but I was having trouble working on two books at the same time. One of the books I wanted to write was an ethnography of a table tennis community. Table tennis communities present so many interesting anthropological questions: When players from around the world come together to play, as they do in table tennis clubs throughout the US, how do they create a new table tennis culture together? How are the norms and discourse of these communities established? How do the norms of these communities become internalized? How do new players integrate into these communities? How do these table tennis communities foster personal meaning and identities? What are the stories table tennis players tell each other?

The other book I wanted to write concerned my experiences as a ping pong pop. Much of my life over the past few years has been consumed by my son’s training and tournaments. Many mothers and fathers have similar experiences as they dedicate their time to their children’s activities. But table tennis in this country remains somewhat hidden, so I wanted to share my experiences, partially to introduce this hidden world to others.

The Talmud relates that a person who regularly gives charity (tzedakah) merits having wise children. I doubt I’ve been charitable enough to lend support to such a claim, but my children are certainly more grounded and levelheaded than I am, so I often consult with them for advice. One afternoon I shared my dilemma, my inability to effectively work on two books simultaneously, with my teenage daughter, Rivka. I explained the premise of both books and asked her for advice on which one I should pursue first. She sagely responded that I’d misunderstood the situation and asked the wrong question. It is not a problem to work on two writing projects at once; rather, in her opinion, I was stalling because I didn’t actually have two writing projects to work on. She has read and enjoyed a number of ethnographies—one of the underappreciated perks of being the daughter of an anthropologist—and she said an ethnography that fails to include my place in the sport, as player, coach, and dad, would be incomplete and unsatisfactory. Rivka argued that my views and experiences as a ping pong pop were interesting because I often viewed the table tennis community through an anthropological lens. Due to my professional life, I can’t help but see it any other way. Likewise, turning my anthropological vision on the table tennis community is surely influenced by my position in the community. I am not simply an objective observer, as anthropologists once envisioned themselves. I’m a member of the community and my place in the community is impacted by my various roles and identities in life. My daughter concluded, You only have one book to write so there is no reason for further delay. Sage advice indeed.

What is Anthropology?

When I leave the cozy confines of academia there is one question in social situations that terrifies me more than any other: What do you do for a living? I usually respond I’m an anthropology professor or something similar. With the exception of the woman who exclaimed, Oh how exciting to study dogs!—which left me in dumbfounded silence—over the years I’ve found that my occupation typically elicits one of two responses. The first and most feared response is a puzzled expression accompanied by complete conversation-ending silence; maybe they are contemplating a dog-related comment, but wisely refrain. The second, less painful, response is: Really? That was my favorite class in college! I of course share that it was my favorite class too. But invariably, and stupidly, I must ask why if it was their favorite class they didn’t pursue it further, like yours truly. Predictably, they tell me they wanted to earn a living, and then they catch themselves, realizing their faux pas, and the conversation fades into uncomfortable silence. Whoever said that all paths lead to the same destination was evidently on to something.

Since I plan to approach the world of table tennis as an anthropologist, at least partially, it is worth saying a few words about anthropology, as it is a field that is either unknown or misunderstood by many. Although the term anthropology has been in use for hundreds of years, anthropology as an academic discipline is relatively new, gaining traction with the development of university departments in the late nineteenth century. In the US, anthropology embraces a holistic four-field approach that was advanced by Franz Boas, who served as the chair of Clark University’s anthropology department when it became the first US program to award a PhD in anthropology. The four fields are typically referred to as archaeology and cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology.

Clifford Geertz, one of anthropology’s most influential scholars, describes anthropology as:

perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship.

After thirty years of a life in anthropology, I am still infected by that romantic image. In my research career I have dabbled in other academic disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, and although it is hardly an objective position, I remain continually impressed and compelled by anthropology’s vision. I often joke that I study humans for a living because I don’t understand them; particularly baffling to me is that on the whole humans ignore anthropological scholarship. Anthropology, by all measures, is a muted child in public discourse, overshadowed by psychology, economics, and the health sciences.

Anthropology distinguishes itself from the other social sciences as the study of humanity across time and space; its focus on all human cultures, wherever and whenever they exist, is unique in the academy. Anthropology has also carved out its intellectual niche by studying humans with a particular set of theories and methodologies.

Theory and method in anthropology are often intertwined, as anthropological theories of the human condition frequently emerge from the discipline’s primary research method, broadly referred to as ethnography. Participant observation is at the core of ethnographic research, and it entails living—that is, eating, sleeping, conversing, making friends, making enemies, celebrating, mourning, and pursuing every other imaginable human activity—with the people the ethnographer is studying. Apprenticeship as a mode of ethnography has been a particularly important avenue for studying embodied activities, including sport. Apprenticeship allows the ethnographer to encounter the socialization process just as novices themselves experience the process and thus is a valued ethnographic method for exploring issues concerning cultural learning and integration. Indeed, anthropologists have become increasingly skeptical of non-participatory ethnography in which the ethnographer observes, but in striving for alleged non-interference and objectivity, does not learn how to partake in the activity under investigation. Nowadays, if the locals engage in peyote rituals, things get very interesting for the ethnographer.

This proactive participation is in contrast to earlier generations of anthropologists who collectively saw themselves as pursuing an objective science. That started to change around the 1950s and ’60s, when cultural anthropologists began to appreciate their role in the ethnographic experience. Ethnographers recognized that they were not performing detached experiments on amoebae or mice; they were living with the people they were studying, influencing and being influenced by them.

Since that time anthropology has largely been divided between those who see themselves as pursuing a science of the human condition and those who see anthropology as an interpretive practice, many of whom argue that as humans, a science of the human condition is objectively impossible. I’ve spent much of my career straddling these two worlds because I see merit in both positions. Another double identity.

As anthropologists began to appreciate their role in the ethnographic process, one corrective was for them to be up front about their own backgrounds. The aim was to alert readers about potential biases in the forthcoming account. For example, in one of my favorite ethnographies, Barbara Myerhoff explains that she was interested in studying elderly Jews at a Jewish Center in California because this is who she will become, an elderly Jewish lady (tragically, it was not to be; she passed away from lung cancer before she was fifty). Or Loic Wacquant, in his classic ethnography of an inner-city Chicago boxing gym, explains how as a Frenchman he was able to conduct fieldwork in this all-Black gym without racial tension because although he is White, as a Frenchman he was outside the Black-White tensions that pervade American life. Having been trained on the scientific side of the aisle, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of these autobiographical notes in ethnography. But I do see the point, and as my daughter has insisted, my own background in table tennis undeniably informs how I perceive and understand the table tennis community.

This book cannot be characterized as an ethnography—it is not a research study—but it does bear several similarities with ethnographic monographs, especially contemporary ones. For instance, anthropologists make a living out of studying and writing ethnographies about marginalized peoples in marginal places. While table tennis is one of the most popular sports in the world—hardly marginal—table tennis communities in the US are commonly hidden away in indistinct buildings and the sport itself is marginalized, generally not even recognized as a sport in this country. Also, anthropologists appreciate that history plays a critical role in shaping cultures, so like most ethnographies I will include the requisite historical chapter to provide some background on the origins and development of table tennis. Moreover, in addition to autobiographical material aimed at revealing their biases, anthropologists since the latter half of the twentieth century nearly always intersperse personal narratives with cultural descriptions to present their ethnographic material, as I do in the pages that follow. Autobiography, as anthropologist Ruth Behar has put it, can be viewed as the handmaiden of ethnography.

One last point on this book’s relation to ethnography. In the public imagination, anthropology is exotic and possibly even mysterious. But ethnographic writing, the gateway into the exotic worlds that anthropologists study, frankly, is often mind-numbing. Or let me rephrase that. Ethnographic writing is like olives: it’s an acquired taste. I love reading ethnographies (and eating olives), but reading ethnographic work requires a different mindset than reading most other books. Why? It’s the details. The insufferable, excruciating, hair-pulling, exhaustive descriptions of everything from basket-weaving styles to tuber-harvesting strategies. Anthropologists are obsessed with documenting details. The rest of humanity evidently prefers texting and Twitter.

It is through the details that we as anthropologists are able to interpret a culture, recognizing that cultural behaviors contain many layers of meaning. The details, or thick description as Geertz put it, allow us to distinguish between an eye twitch and a wink, or even a parody of a wink. At times in the pages that follow I will offer a thick description of the American table tennis world. In other words, I’ll describe minor and often mundane facets of life in this community that would likely go unmentioned and even unnoticed in other accounts of table tennis in America. Optimistically, these details will bring you into an unknown world, as well as permit me to make some meaningful interpretations of the lives that inhabit this world. And perhaps, if I’m lucky, these details will even reveal symbolic truths about meanings of the human condition. Those who are wiser than I am, however, have warned me that readers are at risk of getting lost in the table tennis weeds. Yet, I’m hoping that I can offer a shift in perspective and that in your stroll through the meadow of this book, so to speak, the weeds will be experienced as wildflowers. I’m inclined to describe each wildflower, because, as an anthropologist I’m a firm believer that when entering another world there is value in such attention. I’ve heard it said that beauty, truth, the devil, angels, and even God is in the details. For me, the anthropological message is that understanding is in the details.

A Third Identity

Like everyone, I have many identities and roles, including son, brother, Trekkie, jazz-enthusiast, guitar-picking folkie, and wannabe hobbit. Aside from being a father and a paddle-wielding anthropologist, though, my most important identity in this book is that my family is Jewish, and we are so-called observant Jews. That requires a little unpacking as anthropologists are wont to say. We are not observant in the anthropological sense of being watchers (although we do that as well, typically on Shabbat, when birds at our two birdfeeders, rather than humans, are our object of interest). We observe Jewish law (halacha), or at least we try to.

I need to place great emphasis on that last phrase. Jewish observance for us is not black and white, nor is it grey. A blurry kaleidoscope might be the most apt image. There are some halachot that are non-negotiable, but most of those are probably the same laws we all live by, such as avoiding killing, stealing, and deli sandwiches on white bread with mayo. Other Jewish laws are under somewhat regular negotiation, and the line we are trying not to cross often moves in ways that it doesn’t for most so-called observant Jews. Nor do all those in our family pack—there are six of us—draw these lines in the same places. I marvel at families who are all on the same page and clearly follow halacha according to the interpretation of this or that erudite rabbi. Like most anthropologists, I have a genuine problem with authority—my father told me repeatedly throughout childhood: you’d better find a job where you are your own boss—which means my Jewish life gets a little messy and inconsistent. One manifestation of my anti-authoritarianism is that I have an incurable allergy for adjectival Judaism, whether it is Reform, Reconstructionist, Progressive, Liberal, Conservative, Orthodox, or Conservadox Judaism. I have trouble hearing anyone who tells me this is the correct way. I’m thrilled that there are so many flavors of Judaism (and there are countless more than I’ve listed), but to put it simply, I’m just Jewish and have spent most of my life trying to figure out what that means. I know it means I’m connected with a people who have a long and remarkable history. They are a geographically and intellectually meandering people—the Wandering Jew—who have introduced the world to many fascinating and revolutionary ideas throughout their journeys. They are also a people with curious affinities for chess, economics, Chinese food, complaining and arguing, anthropology, and table tennis.

The last item on this list deserves a comment, if for no other reason than that I recently mentioned to a Jewish friend that one day I would like to write a book on the history of Jewish table tennis players, which literally sent him to the floor, laughing uncontrollably. When I am able, I get great satisfaction in making my friends laugh, but in this case, I was being serious. As will be evident throughout this book, Jews have played an outsized role in table tennis, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to World War II, Jews dominated the sport, much like the Chinese do today. For example, of the ten Men’s Singles World Championships from 1930 until 1939, when world sporting competitions were curtailed because of the war, Jews captured eight of these championships and 1933 was the only year in which there was not a Jewish runner-up. One of those champions, Richard Bergman, was able to win two more singles World Championships after the war (1948 and 1950), but Asia would take the domination baton from Jewish men shortly thereafter. The reign of Jewish women lasted slightly longer. Anna Sipos and Ruth Aarons, from Hungary and the United States respectively, each won two singles World Championships in the 1930s. But the most successful women’s player of all time is Romania’s Angelica Rozeanu, née Adelstein. She captured the Women’s Singles World Championship for an unprecedented six consecutive years (1950–1955), despite unrelenting anti-Semitism from Romanian authorities that limited her training and travel, and the disruption of her career because of the war. Beginning in 1936, she was the Romanian national champion for more than twenty years until her eventual immigration to Israel in the late 1950s.

Jews similarly dominated the US table tennis scene in the first half of the twentieth century, a history that for some reason has not been told. In probably the most comprehensive historical treatment of American Jews and sport in the early twentieth century, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience, Peter Levine discusses everything from Jewish bullfighters to Jewish weightlifters, but table tennis players are not mentioned even once. Yet Dick Miles won an unmatched ten US Opens, which served to crown a national champion until official national championships were introduced in the 1970s. Miles’s record is particularly impressive because US Opens are more competitive than US National Championships since foreign players can compete in them. Other Jewish Men’s US Open Champions include Marty Reisman, Erwin Klein, Sol Schiff, and Abe Berenbaum. Jewish Women’s US Open Champions include the aforementioned Ruth Aarons and Leah Thall-Neuberger, a nine-time US Open Singles Champion, which like Miles’s record is also unsurpassed. Maybe I’ll write